The Drev that stood at the front of the group was over three meters tall and glowed with the requisite golden light of Revelation. Behind her and to the sides, twin waterfalls spilled from the two crescent points churning downwards into the sea. A light wind kicked up, spraying the platform with translucent white mist.

Dewdrops collected on the front of his armor as he stepped forward.

The Drev did the same, her carapace like a drop of blood against white canvas. There was something almost, strange about her in comparison to the other Drev he had met. Her features were thicker, her face.... Shorter?

Looking into her eyes, Adam got the feeling she was very, very old.

"I am afraid you have the unfair advantage of knowing who I am. I cannot say the same for you."

She looked him up and down, likely deciding whether she would stoop to answer his questions, but finally, "I am Chehan."

"Chehan." He turned the word over in his mouth. It wasn't a word he recognized, but the name was familiar. It took him a moment to think it through before recognition finally dawned on him.

"The first saint!" His exclamation echoed over their little standoff.

The Drev tilted her head at him, "Ver good, human. Now that we have finished with introductions, I am afraid we will be returning you to where you belong."

Adam sighed, feeling the marines go stiff behind him, "Ah, you see, that is where we are going to have to disagree."
She didn't seem perturbed, "No, I don't believe you understand, Impetus. You may be used to getting your way, but like a spoiled child the indulgence has to stop somewhere. We have put up with your antics for too long, and it is time for a timeout."

"Is anyone else here getting tired of all this "you are a child" talk?"

The marines behind him grumbled.

"That TALK is because you ARE children. You cannot and will not understand what is at stake. You are impudent, insolent, tantrum throwing children hell bent on your own destruction, and you impetus, are the worst. You have been causing problems for the architect for going on 100 years now."

Adam frowned.

Behind the saint, one of the Drev stepped forward to her shoulder, "General.... We shouldn't say..."

She held up a hand, "He knows too much already, this will not make a difference, and I am tried of being cryptic."

Adam continued to frown through the visor of his helmet, "What are you talking about? My thirtieth birthday is like two months from now."

She stepped forward until she was almost nose to nose with Adam. They stared at each other face to face before she turned and waved her hand at the glowing orb and the stunning vista of turquoise blue and red that surrounded them, the serene waterfalls, the birds cutting through the air, the schools of dolphins and alien marine life playing in the sea, "What you have stumbled upon is the root of all that lives in this universe, the most sacred spot ever to have existed under revelation. This planet is Genesis, and what you see here." She held her hands up, "The cradle of life."

The implications of such an announcement were hard to ignore, and the group of humans and one Drev turned slowly in a circle staring at the blue sky above and the golden rays of sun, the proliferation of wildlife, everything.

"Holy shit." Adam muttered

"An understatement, I think. " She said mildly, raising her hand to point back at the circle, "This is where the anima originates, created by the architect himself as only the architect can, and before the war with the void became as dire as it is, this is where the anima were housed for up to a thousand years before we were forced to hide them within the constructs. You see adolescent anima are incapable of controlling their power output, and the pulses can be powerful enough to alert the void to our position. When the void were weak, this did not matter so much, and young anima could be housed here as, while they were still developing, that power output could be very low. Only when they started to generate greater power were we forced to hide them within the constructs, to speed up their development, and hide them from the void. Then A hundred of your years ago, the last Anima were born."

Adam shifted nervously as the Drev paced around him, "In the architect's wisdom, he went out of his way to create anima that would be powerful in the coming war. Deus, but greater, an Elite version of anima that would be more powerful than all those seen before. What none of us could expected was how much of a pain in the ass they were going to be." She gave him a scathing look, "They developed far faster than the anima you will find here. You see anima usually take thousands if not billions of years to reach the point where they must be hidden by a construct, but no, not these anima were almost to full power potential out of the gate."

Adam shifted nervously as the circle of Drev warriors began fanning out around them.

He kept an eye out, Fealty marking each and every one of them on his HUD eager for an upcoming battle.

"These anima were so powerful, that they could already take physical form, unheard of in any anima that has not yet taken a construct. This because a major problem seeing as, they had a habit and a knack for stealing aircraft."

Oh, now it made sense

"They wanted to be involved in the war from early on, so the architect was forced to send them away early. The Polaris cluster had originally been created to house powerful dues, to train them up for war, and we did our best to put these new anima here splitting them up among different planets, across continents and galaxies, but somehow some way in a million to one chance, who manages to run into aliens by mere accident? To find and gather his entire group of nuisances and collect them into one giant nuisance."

Adam was speechless.

She prodded him in the chest plate of his armor, "We put you on a world that hadn't even attempted interstellar Travel, yet SOMEHOW someway in the course of less than a decade you have managed to peace your little group of idiots back together, and ended up on our doorstep. You the second youngest anima in the , the number one biggest nuisance."

Inside he was still trying to peace all of this together, to wrap his head around what he was hearing. It was slow going, and he decided to push those revelations aside for the moment and deal with them later, "Its actually quite flattering."

She glared at him.

"To be an annoyance on a cosmic scale at such a young age, my parents would be so proud."

"I have always hated that smug tone of yours."

"Have I always had that? Huh, I thought it was a genetic trait."

The group of Drev before him had already fanned out completely and they were beginning to close in. The marines were starting to match them as the standoff moved to breaking point.

And then something happened.

He saw it out of the corner of his eye.

The warrior standing before Kanan froze. Its face was covered by a helmet as was Kanan. Adam's gaze turned away from their leader slowly drawn by the unusual stillness of the Drev warrior. Chehan turned to follow his gaze just in time to see the Drev warrior's helmet suddenly retract, revealing a Drev that Adam, or anyone else could only have described as beautiful.

She was tall, and strong, and almost willowy for a Drev, and her carapace was the color of a newly polished pearl, white and sparkling with gold.

"Kanan!?"

Kanan staggered back almost falling over but writing himself before, "Neehchal!? The entire group had turned to stare at them as Kanan ripped off his helmet, golden eyes wide with joy and sadness and a relief so profound it outshined the golden light of Revelation.

"Kanan?" She shouted again, throwing her arms around his neck weapon clattering to the platform below.

Chehan was still trying to regain herself when Adam got his idea.

Kanan's implant buzzed once, "Forgive me?" he asked simply.

Kanan, still holding his long lost love in his arms, understood and responded, "Go, give me this moment."

With his permission Adam turned, and with all the strength in the SE armor, he picked up Chehan and threw her at the group of warriors to his front. She was large enough that she knocked down three of her own warriors, causing them to spin and roll over the platform in disarray, leaving a sizable hole open towards the glowing orb.

There was shouting.

Behind them Kanan and Neechal didn't bother to look up as Adam bolted through the opening, followed by a group of marines, shouting their war cry.

At first Adam wasn't sure what he was going to do. The SE armor powered him quickly over the platform and towards the edge. The golden orb glowed up in his vision, the ledge approaching at a breakneck speed, and then.... He just knew.

Adam reached the edge of the platform and did not stop.

With a shout, he threw himself off of one foot, leaping bodily into the air out over nothingness. Two waterfalls roared on either side of him casting mist over his vision. Below the sea lapped and churned and above golden light of Revelation beamed down upon him Ahead the glowing orb seemed to expand as he was momentarily suspended there at the zenith of his arc.

And then he began to fall.

His stomach dropped out and his legs and arms flailed.

He pitched forward, momentarily thinking this had been a huge mistake, but then, the light before him continued to expand, and he was enveloped in its glow, warm and bright and.... Familiar.

***

Adam awoke in the cradle of life.

All around him the bodies of marines lay flat on their stomachs in various stages of waking, groaning lightly and staggering as they pushed themselves upright.

It took a moment for the systems in Adam's helmet to reboot, and he could sense that Fealty was getting very annoyed at constantly being forced to restart the system. Its annoyance didn't last long as the group of them turned to look at the scene before them.

They stood in a shallow white canyon, with a trickling stream bubbling below their feet. There was no rock or loose debris, so the place was almost, eerie in how white it was, smooth and cool like porcelain.

Ramirez rubbed his head, "If this shit continues my brain is going to explode, and you are going to have to scoop me out from inside this helmet.

Adam felt similarly but was trying very hard not to think about the hard and fast oncoming revelations, so he shook himself and ordered his men forward. Don't think just go, and that is what he did, leading them down through the canyon and towards the distant light he could see spilling in through slit opening in the stone. Little streams joined the one in which they stood until they were wading through ankle deep water, and then knee deep water.

It was almost becoming difficult to walk when the path finally opened up before them and Adam had to pull to a stop as another precipice appeared before him.

Water spilled out over the ledge into.

Infinite sky.

He froze in place awed as he stared out into pure blue extending in all directions, the familiar sight from flight school, the experience, the color, and the feeling that he had always found the most soothing, and now he knew why. Before him there was no ground, now earth, but a vastness of atmosphere in eggshell blue dotted with clouds and mist on occasion, but filled in all directions with thousands of little pinpricks of light in a million different colors, floating gently through the blue like moving constellations.

Infant anima.

No one spoke eyes riveted in the distance and the only solid landmark of this strange place.

A massive figure, so large that words cannot comprehend the size, large enough that Adam was sure they couldn't be back on genesis anymore because it would have been far too big. The figure reminded him of the first and only time he had ever seen a starborn queen, towering well above her hive counterparts floating in space, beautiful and dangerous.

But this, figure, this creature, this person, this deity was beyond comprehension. When his mind tried to form words for her, he found that he could not. His eyes tried to drink in the image all at once but failed as his construct could not comprehend the eternal. Instead he saw only pieces, a shape, a woman always, humanoid mostly, but when he turned his head sometimes the shape would shift and he would see multiple different figures, Drev Tesraki Finnari and more, but still he always had the same feeling.

She was unnamable, incomprehensible.

Not the Architect, but similar?

Equally as powerful.

The opposite side of the same coin.

But since she could not be named, she was also hard to remember. Only the feelings she gave off tended to remain, Love, peace, joy, and contented sadness.

Construct eyes had never gazed upon her, and could not realistically. Both his suit and his brain immediately short circuited , and he pitched forward into space, his mind a well of confusion and emotion that his body could not realistically hold.

No one could.

And the other marines experienced the same one by one falling into a sky full of constellation.